A Conversation with Deb Olin Unferth
recorded November 7, 2009
R. Dale Smith: I want to welcome everyone. This is the first event of our day-long festival celebrating Deb Olin Unferth’s novel Vacation, which I know many of you are familiar with. She is the winner of the 2009 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. A little info about Deb: She teaches for the English Department at Wesleyan University. Vacation is actually her second book, her first novel, but her second book. Her first book was a collection of short fiction. She told me last night that her second novel is finished, a draft of it, and it is with her agent, David McCormick, who we will meet later tonight. Right now, you all are invited to ask her any questions you may have about her novel Vacation or about her writing process. Somebody gets to jump in.
Audience: I’d like to know, since Dale just said you finished your second novel, how was the process different between writing your first novel and writing your second.
Deb Olin Unferth: The second novel isn’t really a novel. The process was different in that the other form that it is—I had to read a lot of books in that form and try to figure out how a book like that is written, and try to figure out how to do it in an artful way, a way that I could own it. Just in the same way when I was writing Vacation, I felt I had to read a lot of novels. I wanted to approach the novel with daring and disregard for the norm, in the same way that I did with stories. And so when I tried to do the third book I had to also kind of understand what the form is, what the tradition is, what the history is, and, again, try to be daring. So that’s what’s similar. What’s different is that the forms are really different, so it was a big challenge.
Audience: Can I ask what form it is?
DOU: Well, I’m scared! Maybe later I’ll tell you, maybe I’ll warm up a little and . . .
Audience: Where did you get the idea for Vacation?
DOU: I think that it was first just an image in my mind of someone leaving. It started with what I call an initia—i-n-i-t-i-a—and somewhere I heard that word and I just grabbed it and I don’t know how it’s used. So my initia was this image of someone leaving, and I initially thought of it as someone coming back and leaving again and coming back and leaving again, and that felt very static. So then I had to just leave, leave, leave, leave, leave—just continuingly getting further and further away from the place that the person wanted to be, to begin with.
Audience: Being edited by McSweeney’s, do feel your writing has to meet a certain degree, a certain standard?
DOU: The question was, “Writing for McSweeney’s, do I feel like I need to meet a certain standard?” You know, I was really lucky because I think that my writing style is a little different than what you might find in most bookstores, or just a general novel from a big press. And I was having a really hard time finding someone who would respect that voice. And that voice was the only reason I wanted to write. I mean, for me, writing another novel, just like another novel that you see in the store, there is no reason to do that. I mean, I may as well be a lawyer and help poor people. Or I may as well do something with my life that contributes to the world in a way that is quantifiable, as opposed to just like writing books that already exist.
I wanted to do something really different, and McSweeney’s is the place to do that. I came to them with this book and Eli was just completely into it. And, actually, the thing with the book of stories, you know, it’s just a slim collection of stories that was first rejected by every press in the country, some more than once—I mean, it was a nightmare—actually, many more than once, because I kept sending it to them. And then I sent one little tiny story to McSweeney’s just to put in their quarterly journal, and Dave Eggers himself wrote me back. He just wrote me an email, you know, and said this is so great and I have been seeing your stories around, you know, I really like them a lot. So I emailed him and I was like, Well, I do have a collection. And he emailed back and said send it over. So I called my agent and I said, What am I gonna do? You know, McSweeney’s has already rejected this like, how many times? And he said change the name and like switch the stories around and send it to him. So that’s what I did. And then Dave wanted to take it but he said there’s no way anyone’s gonna buy this weird book. You know, it was a full book, now it’s very slim. So he said how about if I write a little book of short shorts, and if we get a third person to write a little book of short shorts, and we’ll publish them in three separate volumes, and put them in a box, and then people will buy it. And I was like, Yes! That sounds like a great idea! So we did that. I feel like McSweeney’s is incredibly respectful and excited about people who are trying to do something artful.
Audience: Can you talk a little about the process of this book? Because we’ve been talking about that in class because it’s so different, you know, the structure of the book. And so we’ve been curious how you wrote it—if you wrote it kind of straightforward following one narrative and then going to another one, or if you sort of jumped back and forth from the various points of view as you were writing it.
DOU: The question is what was my process for writing Vacation. I mean, that book was written out of desperation. You know, I just really, really wanted to write that book, and I could not figure out how to do it. So I wanted the book to not just be about this character Myers, I wanted it to be about the idea of leaving, and the idea of vacating, the idea of leaving behind what you love because you don’t know how to be close to it, or of trying to get close to something and the closer that you try to get to it the farther you’re getting from it. You know, I wanted to write about that thematically and how that exists in all of our lives, or at least all passionate lives, you know, all lives that have existential struggle in it—I think it’s just an aspect of intimacy. So I wanted to write about that. And I wasn’t really sure how to do it.
I saw this Ionesco play, it’s called the Plague [sic]. There’s this scene where there are these two sets of characters on either side—there’s a man and a woman and a man and a woman—and one in each pair is dying. Like the woman on this side is dying and the man on this side is dying. They’re dying of the plague. And there’s this farewell-thing going on where they’re saying goodbye to each other. And they both have the exact same dialogue. And they’re saying it in unison, the exact same thing, and it’s intense. And so then it didn’t feel like it was just about those two individuals sitting there, it felt like it was about the concept of dying, about the platonic form of dying, and the human participation in that. I wanted to somehow create that and the only way I could think to do it was to talk about it from many different perspectives. So I had the character of Gray, he’s leaving. You know, you have Myers and he’s leaving. You have the wife, the wife is leaving. You have all of these people who are all leaving in different ways or being left, being left by people. Like even the receptionist in the embassy, even she is being left. And I thought that that might create this kind of hum off the page. So the process, I guess, was trying to figure out how to create that.
I wrote all these different stories, they all seemed to relate to me, that what I did when I was trying to figure out how to arrange it was I took the entire book and I cut it into pieces and I taped it to note cards. So every paragraph was on a different note card. And I had them all marked and color-coded and all this stuff. And I had these boxes—and I was living with my husband at the time—we didn’t own any furniture, we just had crates with a board on top and so I had all of these things . . . and then there was this one really horrible day when I accidentally knocked the board off and all the cards fell all over the floor, and it was just like this big chaos, and my entire arrangement was—it was a mess, basically. So what I did was I spent a whole summer just taking those cards and shuffling them and moving them and trying to figure out what story fits next to the other story, how do the stories have conversations with each other? There’s this one chapter where the wife is describing her story, you know, she’s telling her confession. And at the same time you have this guy Spoke who is telling about the time that he fled the revolution. And you have Myers who is fleeing from the law. So I have all of these stories of fleeing right next to each other, and I wanted them all to be talking to each other. So that was how I arranged them: note cards, a lot of note cards.
Audience: It sounds like the book for you was a story collection. It was a collection of stories that were somehow connected thematically through this idea of leaving. But then when you put these stories together it made a novel. In your mind, were you thinking this is “novel” or were you thinking this is “story”;?
DOU: The answer is definitely no, because none of those stories could’ve stood on their own. None of them would’ve existed independently. I wouldn’t have written any of them if it hadn’t been for the other ones. They were all about conversations between each other and they never existed in any way as independent stories or anything. Gray would never have developed as a character if it hadn’t been for the fact that Myers was looking for him. You know, here I had Myers who’s looking for someone—why is he looking for this guy? And at first I thought, Okay, they’re having an affair. And then I was like, No, that’s boring. So I tried to come up with this other thing, then I was like, Well then who is Gray? Why was she following him? Who was he? And that’s why I wrote his story. And then the wife—actually, it was Eli who got me to write the whole wife’s confession. Because I had this idea for her as just like this shadowy figure. She was just kind of in the background and you never really got into her mind, you never figured out why she was following this man. And Eli was like, That’s not gonna work. Then I had to ask myself, So who is the wife and why would she be following this man? So then I had to write her story. I knew at the end that I wanted this whole dolphin-thing, so then I had to ask myself, Okay, so who is this dolphin untrainer? And who loves him? Who wants him? Who wants to be near him and can’t be near him?
So I think that any novel is written that way. Anytime you have two people in a novel you have to tell both of their stories. So, in that sense, you could say, Oh, they’re independent story collections, you know, but they’re not. It’s a novel with stories of different people and how they are intimate with each other.
Audience: You were striving specifically to write something different from what we usually see, and I’m wondering who your influences are, if you see other writers doing similar things, and who they might be?
DOU: Okay, so it was Sam Lipsyte, when I was trying to figure out how to write this novel, he came to KU where I was teaching, and I was like, I can’t do it, I can’t write a novel, it’s just so horrible! And he was the one who wrote on a cocktail napkin, because we were out for martinis, “Approach the novel with the same daring and disregard for the norm that you do with your stories.”; He wrote that down. And then I like stuck that in my wallet and I just carried it around and I kept opening it up and I was like, Yeah, that’s what I have to do! Yes, that’s exactly right! It just became this rhythm in my mind and I was just always thinking about that. So Sam Lipsyte is a huge influence.
Salvador Plascencia, who published a book earlier with McSweeney’s called The People of Paper, and it was a really big influence on me. There’s a book by António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese writer, that’s called An Explanation of the Birds, that was a really big influence. Chris Ware, the graphic novelist, is a really big influence. You know, he does this kind of collaging in a lot of his books, you know, where he has different storylines going on. So I read a lot of his work to try to understand rhythmically how to do collaging. Imagistically, it works in a similar way, transfers from writing to image—especially the Acme Novelty Library, the giant red book, and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The teachings of Gordon Lish, at the level of the sentence, were a big influence on me. Diane Williams studied with Gordon Lish and she’s one of my mentors. And my ex-husband Gary Lutz was a big influence as a writer.
Audience: Was there any part of the novel that stuck with you the whole time you were writing it, that you just kept thinking about?
DOU: I would say that there’s a passage in one of the chapters, I can’t remember, like sixteen or seventeen, where it starts out, “The truth is a man leaves a place. A man leaves another place. And another. And another. And he has to keep leaving but he can’t go back.”; That’s like a long paragraph about how nothing changes and, you know, he just gets sadder. That just stuck with me in my mind. I was trying to create that.
Audience: How many drafts did you have to do before you were finished?
DOU: The question is how many drafts did I have to do. It’s really interesting to me because writers will always say things like, I finished my first draft of such and such, or I sent my second draft to such and such. I mean, I have no idea where one draft begins and the other draft ends because, I mean, it’s just a big mess. It’s a huge, horrible, nightmarish mess! And it goes on for so long. I did a lot of drafts, if I think about it. I was trying to figure out what to read tonight. In the beginning pages, I was remembering all the chapters that I wrote that just got completely cut, you know, they’re just not even there. I mean chapter after chapter, just all thrown out. So, I don’t know, were those drafts? They had to count as drafts. In which case, I would say thousands of drafts. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s really, really hard to write a novel. You know, we have some other novelists in here, they’d be able to speak to this. Do something else if you can.
Audience: So your first book was this slim volume of short shorts, and so that’s one end of the spectrum. And then you go to the novel, and you’re saying, you know, it’s so hard, so hard. If you had to say, as specifically as possible, what were some the difficulties or specific challenges for you from moving from that form, short shorts, to long narrative?
DOU: I would say many. I wrote the little slim volume of stories, which was actually quite long to start with. The agent was sending it out, around, and in the meantime I was writing a novel, but not this novel. I spent like three years writing another novel, that I just had to throw in the garbage. That book of stories, while I was writing that novel that got thrown into the garbage, the book of stories was getting rejected all over the country. And then, the novel was just this complete catastrophe. I mean, it was so bad my agent was like, I don’t know what we’re gonna do with you. First, you write this book of stories that nobody wants, and then you write this horrible novel. I mean, maybe you should just give up. But that wasn’t actually the agent I have now.
So then I wrote Vacation. And Vacation came really fast, it took only like a year and a half, which is pretty amazing. And then Eli and I edited it together for like eight months, so it wasn’t that long. But the first three years where I was writing this completely unrelated book, where I was trying to figure out how to write longer narrative . . . and it was really hard. I think a couple things that I learned, and actually I got these out of running magazines—another thing that I did was that I subscribed to these running magazines because they have all this motivational stuff in there. It sounds really goofy, but I’d cut things out and like hang it on my refrigerator and stuff. One of them was work to your strengths. If you’re good at running the mile, run the mile. So what I decided was I’m good at writing short shorts, so I tried to make this novel into a lot of different short shorts that could be moved around and arranged so they could be like in conversation with each other. So that was one thing, and that was a big lesson. Another thing was that I had to start thinking of everything in terms of arc, everything in terms of narrative arc. And that is not just the overall story as narrative arc, but also the individual chapters as narrative arcs, also the individual sections, the little crots—I think of those little tiny segments as crots—each of those as having a narrative arc, and even each paragraph, and even each sentence having a narrative arc within it. So that everything is about rhythm and arc, rhythm and arc. What is gonna build up? And what is gonna take away? So that was a really big lesson. I had thought about it with regard to stories, but since stories are so small, I didn’t have to think about it so grandly.
Audience: In regards to you throwing away the novel—we talk about “killing your darlings”; a lot—was it really hard to just throw that novel out after working on it for so long?
DOU: I’m really used to it by this time. I keep a folder of a lot of deleted stuff. And then, a lot of times, if I’m just lost, I can go in there and find something and transform it, and use it in a different way. But I would say that I only use like ten to fifteen percent of it. A lot of it just stays there and probably will never get used. The thing is, about writing those darling sentences, is that it’s not about those sentences, it’s about learning how to be a writer, and it’s about learning how to hear sound. The reason that you like those sentences is because of the way that they sound. You know, they sound good to you. It’s not like you wrote the best sentence about Cinderella finding the shoe or something. It’s that you think it sounds good. So what you’re learning with those darlings is that you’re learning how to hear your own voice, or you’re learning how to hear what art sounds like. And so you don’t have to keep the words, just learn the lesson and then apply it to your work for the next round.
Audience: You mentioned trying to be different and daring with your own writing, and also trying to be artful. I wondered what you feel is the relation between art and daring.
DOU: I feel like a lot of things get passed off as art that are just comforting, they’re just comfort at this point. Maybe at one point they were truly art, they were truly revolution in some way, they would challenge the way that we perceive our lives in some way. And I feel like now there’s a lot of art that is just . . . it’s there to just kind of give us something to look at or to read while were just kind of tired, and we don’t want to have too much to think about. And I don’t consider that art. That’s entertainment, which is really different. I want to create art. Of course I also want to be entertaining, but that’s secondary for me. I mean, I’m an artist. So in order to be an artist, I have to be willing to take big risks. I have to be willing, for example, to write a book where the plot and the direction that the narrative is taking is so odd, and the formulation of it is so odd, that no one’s gonna want to publish it, gonna want to read it. I mean, I’m just taking that risk and that risk is worth it to me. Because what’s my other choice? To just be entertainment? Is that what I want with my life? To just be entertainment? I want my life to have deep meaning. And I try to make all of my work to be an expression of the sound that’s in my head, my own sort of existential terror, and my own crying out for intimacy, you know, whatever it is, it’s this very vulnerable object that I place in the world. I feel okay about that, you know, I mean, at least I tried. I think being an artist is about being willing to do that, being willing to take big risks no matter what the sacrifices are.
Audience: Do you make a distinction between being a writer and being a storyteller?
DOU: I consider myself to be both a storyteller and a writer. I make huge efforts in all of my work to have a really strong narrative strand all the way through. More and more, the more that I write, the more dedicated I am to doing that. In this book that I just turned in, actually I tried even more to do that, even more than in Vacation. So I feel like that’s an essential part. I feel like the writing always comes first for me, the quality of the language comes first, but both have to be there. Some of my favorite writers who I admire immensely feel like the storytelling part of it doesn’t really mean very much, that you can get a story anywhere, but you can’t get good writing anywhere. You can turn on your TV and watch commercials and get a story, like Kleenex commercials will have you crying by the end of them. But something that has profound statements and told in a way that will resonate within you, you can’t get that anywhere. So I feel like I want to make the profound statements that resonate, but I also really want to tell a story, where some of the writers I most admire want to make the profound statements and that that’s more important.
Audience: Do you start with voice? Is that what you get first in your head when you start or is it an image?
DOU: I think I start with sound first. I hear something in my head and then I try to record the sound. The problem is, writing a novel, all of a sudden you’re confronted with the fact that you have to write all these scenes and things that maybe you are not hearing. But you need that scene. So you have to invent the sound, you have to somehow create that and turn it into a scene, you know, that’s exciting and inspiring. It can’t be just like the furniture moving. You know, you have to make that adventurous—that becomes hard. You have to find the sound inside you. 
